The Bards’ science, of Metacorporology, had only recently been developed in response to the growing need for intelligence in the war against the Bureaucron.It was very controversial. Its epistemology was considered by many to be flawed, and possibly even Bureaucron-prone. The AEL, for instance, who were smearers par excellence, felt that “ingenuae” could not be treated as empirical evidence of the emotive reality that produced them. It was not that solid forms of human consciousness were prone to contamination by the spuria of Medium-Transference technology, as some critics simply thought, but that they were so materially different to the smearessences they were assumed to represent for it ever to be possible to have corporeal knowledge of their smear of origin.

The Bards claimed that their research revealed evidence that Earth humans had high levels of social sincerity and moral integrity measurable by the amounts of empathetic emotions present in the “ingenuae” they’d analyzed. It was recognized that races displaying such levels of comitas were likely to have a latent genetic immunity to the Bureaucron virus which usually limited the pandemic to approximately 150 generations post-allele stage. It is currently believed that the Bureaucron virus is able to evolve in such a way that it incorporates itself into the host’s genetic code at the level of the allele, becoming an integral part of the host, infection thus being spread through host reproduction. Bureaucron infestation thus occurs in stages. The initial or “outlaw” stage, where the virus is host-independent, occurs when viral spores enter a planet’s atmosphere, though exactly how they arrive there is not fully understood.

Airborne infection (parasitic stage) of suitable hosts (i.e species with an evolving complex CNS) appears only to occur under certain specific local conditions and it is thought that such infection may actually itself be a necessary condition for the advanced socio-cultural evolution of a host-species. In fact, since no infested species has yet been found that does not display sophisticated levels of socio-cultural development, it is thought that such development and the Bureaucron’s ability to become genetically incorporated (unified stage) are inter-dependent. Many species across the multiverse have been infected but certain species appear to develop cumulative immunity over many generations and thus free themselves of the infestation. A few individual members of these species somehow had full immunity and never became infected. The AEL is made up of creatures that have full species-immunity since the Bureaucron tend to infect sighted species, or species like the Bards whose distant ancestors were sighted and whose present genetic patterns are the result of necessary minglings with other species due to cataclysmic cosmic events that destroyed their homeworlds.

It is believed that there is yet another stage, the endstage, in the Bureaucron’s evolution, that will occur in a species that has very few or no members with full/high levels of immunity. The AEL fear Earth humans are such a species since they have only found three humans in all their many minglings whose immunity is high enough for infection not to be manifest. They strongly suspect that these individuals may well be the offspring of matings between certain of their own number and three females who had low level immunity. Whilst such matings by minglers are frowned upon by the Proelium, this infraction of a rather insignificant rule may well turn out to be fortuitous for Earth’s future.

To be continued…